Arab
Slave Traders Supporting Democracy in Syria?:
Recent legal moves by the governments of
Ethiopia, Indonesia and the Philippines to
protect their nationals working in the Persian
Gulf Arab states point to this harrowing fact:
the Arab slave trade in foreign workers is alive
and well.

By Finian Cunningham

January
03, 2013 "Information
Clearing House"
- Recent legal moves by the governments of
Ethiopia, Indonesia and the Philippines to
protect their nationals working in the Persian
Gulf Arab states point to this harrowing fact:
the Arab slave trade in foreign workers is alive
and well.

Rights groups
estimate that there are up to 15 million migrant
workers located in the Persian Gulf Arab countries
of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and
the United Arab Emirates. Paid pittance wages and
subsisting in dirty, overcrowded dwellings, these
workers provide the labour backbone of the Arab oil
economies.

While the gas and oil sheikhdoms of Qatar and the
UAE boast of gleaming skyscrapers and some of the
highest per capita incomes in the world, the dirty
secret of their seeming success is the massive
immiseration and degradation of millions of human
beings from Asia and Africa.

Yet, we are led to believe by Western mainstream
media that these same Arab monarchies are at the
forefront of supporting Western governments in their
calls for democratic and human rights reforms in
Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East.

Recent New Year celebrations around the world
featured a spectacular fireworks display from
world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa, in
Dubai. When the futuristic tower was officially
opened last May, its inauguration was marred when an
Indian worker leapt to his death. The tragedy was
scarcely reported then. But it represents just one
of hundreds of such suicides committed by foreign
workers across the Persian Gulf Arab emirates and
sheikhdoms. Many other such deaths are caused by
willful neglect and brutality at the hands of
despotic employers.

Also last
year, an Indonesian housemaid was beheaded by
the authorities in Saudi Arabia for killing her
“madam”. The housemaid claimed she had suffered
years of abuse from her employer. The distraught
workers couldn’t take it any more and ended up
attacking her tormentor with a cleaver. In
another under-reported case, an Ethiopian “house
servant” was tortured to death by her sponsor in
the UAE.

This is just a
glimpse of the routine misery that foreign workers
are subjected to in these Arab states.

It is hard to verify the numbers, but it is
estimated that thousands of other such foreign
workers are rotting away in prisons in these Arab
countries, accused of crimes and misdemeanors by
their employers. Misdemeanors can include workers
complaining about harsh conditions or wages
with-held, or absconding from their workplaces.
These latter workers are termed “runaways” and it is
not uncommon to see posters in public places
offering rewards for helping to track down the
absentees. This is slavery in all but name.

The unfortunate masses come from India, Pakistan,
Philippines, Indonesia, Ethiopia and Sudan and work
as housemaids and waitresses and in construction.
All of the gleaming mirrored facades that offer
luxury holiday destinations for rich Westerners and
Arabs are built by labourers who earn as little as
$150 a month. Many of these toilers die from
horrific industrial injuries or heat exhaustion due
to minimal safety standards. At the end of their
12-hour working day, they are herded into trucks to
be taken back to their squalid compounds.

A global network of recruiting agents and employment
sponsors conspire to deliver these workers into
barbaric working conditions that are nothing more
than indentured slavery. Mostly, the workers are
deceived by promises of decent wages and conditions,
only to end up living hellish lives of oppression,
ill health and poverty at the mercy of unscrupulous
“employers” - or more correctly “slave owners”.

Many of the migrant workers find themselves as
unwitting victims in a rampant sex industry.
Compared with the grinding poverty of the Indian
subcontinent or East Africa, many women are lured by
the promise of working as a waitress in a glitzy
Qatari or Dubai hotel, only to find that they are
earmarked to become prostitutes for wealthy Arab and
Western customers.

Various euphemisms are used. “Guest workers”,
“expatriate labourers”, “migrant workers”, “foreign
nationals”. These euphemisms, as with the terms
“employer” and “sponsor”, are used to conceal the
fact that the system of labour underpinning the
Persian Gulf Arab economies is a form of modern
slavery. The workers are denied any legal rights and
often deprived of the measly wages owed to them. On
arrival in the Gulf states, their passports are
confiscated. They have no means of redress and thus
become nothing more than human chattel. Too often,
their only way out of appalling misery is to take
their own lives.

Historically, the Arab slave trade was extant from
the 7th to the 19th Century. It was one of world’s
biggest and oldest slave trades. It predates the
European-American trade by at least 700 years. Where
the latter is reckoned to have enslaved between 11
and 15 million Africans, mainly from the continent’s
West coast, the Arab traders are estimated to have
consigned many more millions to bondage from East
Africa.

Marauding
Africa’s East coast and centered around
Zanzibar, women and young girls were snatched
from what is now Mozambique, Kenya, Ethiopia,
Eritrea, Somalia and Sudan and sold as servants
and sex slaves into the Persian Gulf. The Arab
slave trade of antiquity officially ended in the
19th century. And in 1948, the United Nations’
Universal Declaration of Human Rights banished
all forms of slavery.

However, what
we can tell from the systematic dire conditions of
expatriate workers in the Persian Gulf Arab
economies today is that the Arab slave trade is
still alive and well, affecting millions of
individuals.

In these feudalistic monarchies, which Washington
and London fawn over as “strategic allies”, so
important is slavery to the economies that the
foreign workers outnumber the national populations.
In Bahrain and the UAE, foreign workers count for
more than half the resident population. In Qatar,
some three-quarters of the populace are migrant
workers.

This points up a deeply problematic contradiction
for the rulers. While the wealth of these despots is
undoubtedly increased by the super-exploitation of
dirt-cheap foreign labour, their own populations are
festering with unemployment. In Saudi Arabia, for
example, unemployment among young Saudis is between
30 and 50 per cent, yet the kingdom employs an army
of some nine million foreign workers. This huge
discrepancy is a major grievance among Saudis
fuelling anti-monarchy protests over the past two
years. Unemployment and poverty is of course a
driving cause of resentment among Bahrainis against
the Khalifa regime, which has for decades relied on
the import of cheap labour to shore up its crony
economy.

Another glaring contradiction is the claim by these
same Gulf monarchies that they are supporting a
democratic uprising in Syria, as in Libya last year.
So there you have it. Modern Arab slave-trading
regimes standing up for human rights in other Arab
countries. That’s just too absurd for words.

Finian
Cunningham, originally from Belfast, Ireland, was
born in 1963. He is a prominent expert in
international affairs. The author and media
commentator was expelled from Bahrain in June 2011
for his critical journalism in which he highlighted
human rights violations by the Western-backed
regime. He is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural
Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the
Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England,
before pursuing a career in journalism.

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